| By now, Liu Zheng’s photography is well known among contemporary art circles, as well it should be—prior to this summer, his most critically acclaimed series, The Chinese, was exhibited at Yossi Milo Gallery over three years ago. In the years since, these understated portraits of contemporary Chinese society have been compared to the work of photographers like Diane Arbus and August Sander (contemporary German photographer Ingar Krauss could easily be added to this list). The praise was only one factor that earned Liu another showing of The Chinese at 798 Avant Gallery in May of this year. The series’ political undertones made it an appropriate prelude to the Olympic games in China, although their continuing relevance has more to do with Liu’s ability to capture a perennial complexity in his subjects than a topical link to the current sociopolitical climate. |  |
Éva Pelczer
Liu Zheng, An Actress of Hebei Opera, 2000. Courtesy of 798 Avant Gallery.
By now, Liu Zheng’s photography is well known among contemporary art circles, as well it should be—prior to this summer, his most critically acclaimed series, The Chinese, was exhibited at Yossi Milo Gallery over three years ago. In the years since, these understated portraits of contemporary Chinese society have been compared to the work of photographers like Diane Arbus and August Sander (contemporary German photographer Ingar Krauss could easily be added to this list). The praise was only one factor that earned Liu another showing of The Chinese at 798 Avant Gallery in May of this year. The series’ political undertones made it an appropriate prelude to the Olympic games in China, although their continuing relevance has more to do with Liu’s ability to capture a perennial complexity in his subjects than a topical link to the current sociopolitical climate.
It is telling that The Chinese, the most subtly disarming of Liu’s photographic series, is the most well-known. The surreal quality of its depictions of Chinese citizens—always labeled by their professions, which range from stripper to monk to businessman—comes not from affectation on the photographer’s part, but instead, the distortion of time represented and lived out by his subjects, in a culture where the present day overlaps with past traditionalism. China’s experience of hyper-modernization left many of these people behind. Markers of tradition intermingle, sometimes in confusion, with those of the modern Western world: a boy in a sports jacket sits his pet monkey on his knee; a Taoist priest gives the camera a dignified stare; a schoolboy poses next to his motorcycle. The acute poverty depicted in some of these photographs adds to the sense of displacement and disorder. One gets the sense that the government-engineered train to urbanization flew past the station where its people were waiting. There is little judgment to be found in the photographs, however: Liu is simply, as he has put it, “studying.”
Liu takes a much more pointed approach in his most recent series, Under The Sun (2006). These photographs are quite varied in terms of subject and style; the most compelling are intentionally blurred, as if the subjects had been snapped from the window of a moving car. A group of models perch topless on a speedboat; a prisoner is beaten by a guard; a raunchy porn still is captured. While there is a gritty life in these photos that is raw and appealing, Liu’s stylization of the images is distracting—the images shift the focus, perhaps too much, to the artist’s hand, the invisibility of which gave his previous series its strength. New attempts from Liu at a different photographic language than what we’ve seen could be interesting, though it has been nearly two years since he has exhibited new work. Regardless, The Chinese stands as his most evocative work to date, and its second showing served only as a reminder of Liu’s striking capture of a culture in a delicate state of flux.
